Picador USA
The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World
Key Metrics
- Greg Grandin
- Picador USA
- Paperback
- 9781250062109
- 9.3 X 4.2 X 1 inches
- 0.7 pounds
- History > Americas (North Central South West Indies)
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
NEW YORK TIMES EDITOR'S CHOICE
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE RECOMMENDED BOOK
WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZE
One morning in 1805, off a remote island in the South Pacific, Captain Amasa Delano, a New England seal hunter, climbed aboard a distressed Spanish ship carrying scores of West Africans he thought were slaves. They weren't. In fact, they were performing an elaborate ruse, having risen up earlier and slaughtered most of the crew and officers. When Delano, an idealistic, anti-slavery republican, finally realized the deception-that the men and women he thought were humble slaves were actually running the ship-he rallied his crew to respond with explosive violence.
Drawing on research on four continents, The Empire of Necessity is the untold history of this extraordinary event and its bloody aftermath. Delano's blindness that day has already inspired one masterpiece-Herman Melville's Benito Cereno. Now historian Greg Grandin returns to these dramatic events to paint an indelible portrait of a world in the throes of revolution, providing a new transnational history of slavery in the Americas-and capturing the clash of peoples, economies, and faiths that was the New World in the early 1800s.
Author Bio
Greg Grandin, who received his doctorate at Yale University under the direction of Emilia Viotti da Costa and Gilbert Joseph, previously taught at New York University for nineteen years.
He is the author of seven books, including The Blood of Guatemala, which won the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Award for best book published on Latin America in any discipline, The Last Colonial Massacre, Empire’s Workshop, Fordlandia, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Award, The Empire of Necessity, which won the Bancroft and Beveridge awards in American history, Kissinger’s Shadow, and The End of the Myth, which won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction and was a finalist in the history category.
Grandin is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Society of American Historians. He has co-edited, with Gil Joseph, A Century of Revolution, and, with Deborah Levenson and Elizabeth Oglesby, The Guatemala Reader. Grandin has published widely, in The Nation, where he is a member of the editorial board,the London Review of Books, the New Republic, NACLA’s Report on the Americas, and the New York Times, among other venues.
He is a regular guest on Democracy Now! A revised edition of Empire’s Workshop is forthcoming.
Source: Yale University
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